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I think the best is to have the 89 player threads go up at the same time as the 88 ballot, i.e. in 1 week's time. Otherwise you may well get mis-voting, though I suppose one can always make people correct it.

Personally, I'd like to see the new threads about 1 day later than they normally have been showing up, BUT still post the "19xx Ballot Discussion" thread a little early so anyone who wants to start discussing individual candidates can do so...

Since the only objection to early player threads boils down to, "I can't remember what year guys are eligible," I suggest that when John titles the player threads, he should include the year next to the player's name. For example, instead of just "Carl Yastrzemski", title his thread "Carl Yastrzemski (1989)".

The process of moving to earlier posting of player threads has had a temporary effect of putting out a lot of player threads in a short time, causing a bit of confusion. From here on, we can stay a couple years ahead of candidates' debuts if John continues posting the new five or six threads every two weeks.

Since the only objection to early player threads boils down to, "I can't remember what year guys are eligible,"

I don't think that's the only objection. My objection is it bumps the current threads/players out of the "Hot Topics" list, right at a very critical time in the election (the end) when some of us are scrambling to find certain pieces of information to complete our ballot.

I don't think that's the only objection. My objection is it bumps the current threads/players out of the "Hot Topics" list, right at a very critical time in the election (the end) when some of us are scrambling to find certain pieces of information to complete our ballot.

My objection is it bumps the current threads/players out of the "Hot Topics" list

You should say "bumped"; as I mentioned, that was only a temporary condition which we have just passed. If John now continues to post the normal 5-6 newbie threads every two weeks, this bumping won't happen again. We will then stay a couple elections ahead in beginning our evaluation of newbies. This extra time allowed for assessment can only lead to a better result, IMO.

Each players' year of eligibility IS already right there at the top of the thread.

Right, but I'm suggesting the year be part of the thread title; you could then skim a list of thread titles and find out years of eligibility. Just another small way to help voters do their job better.

841. John (You Can Call Me Grandma) Murphy Posted: October 15, 2006 at 05:51 PM (#2212684)Since there are some who are for and against early posting of the player threads, I'll go with the majority opinion. If I get a majority supporting one position by the end of this week, then I'll abide by it for the remainder of the project.

So far, 9 different members have objected to the earlier posting date. Only 1 has made a continued plea for the earlier date. Several others have entered the discussion to offer compromises or to post counter-arguments without endorsing a position. And yes, I'm including the "Housekeeping" thread. Make of that what you will, Grandma.

I say whatever is the easiest thing for John to do. He's got plenty of things to do here...and in life. I don't see the current system as so problematic that it needs a major overhaul unless it's something John wants or feels he needs to do...unless a new system would create less work for him.

Looking at the former Dr. Chaleeko's list, I noticed a few errors. 1988 is an elect-two not three so that's Stargell plus one backlog. 1990 is an elect-three not two but with Jenkins left over from '89, there's still no room for someone from the backlog.
Next up, now that significant relievers are becoming eligible, you sometimes have to look further down the list. That 1991 year is probably Carew + Fingers + backlog though it's possible that Eric is right and it's Carew + 2.
There may be a lot of boycotts for Rose in 1992, which would open up a slot for either Grich or someone from the backlog. That would push Rose into '93 and either Niekro or Carlton into '94.
Then, 1994 is ridiculously hard to predict. Not only do you have the four borderliners and no clear-cut HOMers, you also have (possibly) Grich and Perez still hanging around from 1992.
After that, I agree with Eric that '96 and '97 could be the best chances for the backlog.
Oh, and I looked a little further ahead than that.

All told, we'll elect 35 HOMers between 1989 and 2000. I think as many as 21 of those spots are going to be easily claimed by new candidates: Yastrzemski, Perry, Bench, Jenkins, Morgan, Palmer, Carew, Fingers, Rose, Seaver, Jackson, Niekro, Carlton, Schmidt, Blyleven, Carter, Brett, Yount, Ryan, Fisk and Gossage. That leaves 14 spots up for grabs. However, those 14 spots won't all go to the current backlog. There are new candidates who aren't as obvious as the titanic twenty-one but who will still get significant consideration: Singleton, Staub, Grich, Perez, Cey, Garvey, Sutton, Nettles, Simmons, Sutter, Da. Evans, John, Rice, Hernandez, Quisenberry, Dw. Evans, Parker, Randolph, Stieb, Morris and Hough. That's more than enough players to claim the other 14 spots though I don't think we'll quite embrace them all. Rather, I would guess that we're looking at 7-8 of the new backlog and 6-7 of the current backlog getting in during this time.

Singleton, Staub, Grich, Perez, Cey, Garvey, Sutton, Nettles, Simmons, Sutter, Da. Evans, John, Rice, Hernandez, Quisenberry, Dw. Evans, Parker, Randolph, Stieb, Morris and Hough. That's more than enough players to claim the other 14 spots though I don't think we'll quite embrace them all. Rather, I would guess that we're looking at 7-8 of the new backlog and 6-7 of the current backlog getting in during this time.

-Now, we all know how I feel about Stieb, but I do think Billy Pierce, Rube Waddell, Hal Newhouser, and Wes Ferrell (among others) set a very strong precedent for Stieb who has a similar pattern of dominance to them. He will be wicked interesting.

-Oh and we should probably put Reuschel in Chris's fourth group, or maybe even his third. Reuschel could draw some votes from career guys, doesn't absolutely lack a peak, and pitched for virtually no good teams in his day (some bad, some mediocre, virtually none good---84 Cubs excepted---until he was age 38 and landed in SF in 1987 and gracefully slid into decline and retirement).

-Agreed, Nettles, Dewey, TJ, Staub are going to be tough. I think Randolph is in their tier as well, but that's just my feeling. Also, I'll add Singleton to that group. He's going to be a very strong peak/prime candidate that could sneak up on us.

-Several "years" ago I thought Quis had a tremendous chance, and I detected that some folks in the electorate had some inking toward him. But I think that's been abating lately. New information about his inherited runners troubles and JoeD's work (I think it was Joe, maybe Sunny or Chris?) showed some potential flies in his ointment. WS, for one, shows him as the AL's best pitcher for the stretch 1983-1985, one of only three relievers it so recognizes (Radatz and Gagne are the others). He'll be real interesting to take apart.

Well, let's say it is 7-8 backloggers, which is probably realistic. Do we have the right ones?

Pos/Top8Backlog/AlsoRans(with 100 pts or more)

C--Trouppe/Bresnahan

Personally I'm more partial to Ellie Howard with some credit for NeL play and for the career interruptus most black players not named Robinson or Mays experienced during the integration era. Bresnahan is legit, too. I'm happy that, adding Ellie, we would have the right 3 guys under consideration.

Related question: Is Trouppe (are Moore, Trouppe and Redding) the best NeLer(s) left?

IF--Childs, Boyer, Fox, D. Moore/Doyle

A case of "ignore the rest." The focus here is already working for these guys while, by comparison, we are spread our "hitters" votes around very broadly. Are these guys really better or just benefiting from our confusion about the hitters? I like Doyle over Childs and Fox, and I still like Ed Williamson over Ken Boyer, but none of these guys is a bad choice. Moore has probably taken over from Kiner, now, as THE pure peak candidate.

Oddly, the top cornerman is not really a "hitter," or is he? His hitting has probably been lost in translation. All those triples that would have been HR in other eras! Interesting that we otherwise are favoring the peakers over the careerists, which is a bit uncharacteristic of the HoM. I would tout Cepeda more except that if y'all looked more closely I'm afraid you might end up preferring Cash. (F. Howard is basically interchangeable with Baby Bull, Gavy and Cash, too.)

In sum, right now we are poised to elect no backlog "pure hitters." And that's OK, we probably have too many already. Or is it OK? And which ONE might it be? I mean besides old eagle eye.

We could go deeper than 2 here and not elect a bad choice, though I prefer Roush and Browning on this list and don't prefer Duffy and GVH. Leach is the guy who remains really intriguing, not to say that he should rate higher but that he is a true true hybrid and therefore more intriguing--more likely to have been misunderstood--than anybody else on the list. How is he NOT better than Hugh Duffy?

P--none/Redding, Walters, Grimes, Welch, Dean

I think we probably need a pitcher but which one? Welch and Dean have their adherents but have for all intents and purposes been rejected. Redding remains poorly understood, is he or isn't he? I don't claim to really know. That leaves Walters, whom I am warming up to. And Bridges and Willis are close to 100 points, but even that would leave them 400 points short of election.

But I also feel that from the under-represented 1950s and especially from the under-represented integration era--and considering pitchers are maybe under-represented as a whole--that Don Newcombe is the one guy not currently in the 100 point club who needs to be better understood, certainly by me. I'm not saying he doesn't belong in 67th place, but I am saying that we probably don't have a collective handle on him. (Well, him and Bobby Estalella.)

I have a few other faves on or near my ballot (F. Howard, Eddie Cicotte) whom I won't bother you with. We all have our lost causes.

But in sum: How about more discussion please for Don Newcombe (way outside looking in), Quincey Trouppe (inside but should he be?), Ellie Howard (outside looking in) and Reggie (oops, Tommy) Leach (in the vestibule, which is not inside). And whether we are under-valuing borderline pitchers generally.

Quincy Trouppe (inside but should he be?)
Yes, absolutely, in my opinion. You're all probably sick of hearing this from me, but Trouppe's case is particularly tough to assess due to a host of circumstances so unlike what we see today that it's difficult to get a good handle on them. The easier to understand stuff (NgL and MxL and MiL stats) show a guy who could hit, whole played mostly catcher but was athletic enough to handle 3B, and who played for a really long time. The years in Bismark and his year in the ring are illusions of his time, his race, and his econocmic situation. He didn't just emerge in 1938 as this wonderful player, he was a good player, growing into a great one all along.

Trouppe was a black atheletes in the depression, where he was, of course, barred from most major sports but also from any kind of upward social and economic mobility. In the near term, the NgLs had recently fallen apart and the second-generation leagues were just forming and on unsure footing. Boxing was the alternative to baseball, and Joe Louis had just won a heavyweight title, and was making good money doing it. A young black ballplayer of that time could likely look forward to a retirement of janitorial, refuse-collection, or security-guard work (no exaggeration, read the Riley book, most of these guys retired to lower-scale, labor-class jobs that white folks didn't want to do). Going to Bismark, from whence no enduring numbers seem to have come out and going into the ring are not questionable career choices, just as Dobie Moore's time with the wreckers was not. Moore played the highest ball he could find for the best price and benefits. Trouppe did the same in Bismark, then followed that with a brief attempt at a sport that probably would have paid better in a particularly difficult economic time.

He went back to baseball and starred. He didn't come out of nowhere. But if his record, without the ND/boxing years (that is, out of nowhere) is assessed, he probably rates as somewhat more meritorious than Bresnahan and Howard, which is where we've currently got him queued. But with some bulk added for those years, he moves up somewhat and his peak/prime/career, falls somewhere within the range described by Gary Carter, Ted Simmons, and Joe Torre: long-career, good-not-amazing peak. I don't know exactly where because I can't draw good estimates from no data. But I think it's enough that he compares favorably to that group to say that he's "in."

A lot questions have come up about his defense. Given the emphasis on running, defense, bunting, and small ball, it's highly dubious that Trouppe could have lasted long as a poor-fielding catcher in the NgLs. The lack of oral history about his defense occurs in part because he was outside the states before the war, inside the states during the war, in ND in the depression, and in the NgL when everyone younger went into organized ball. When he finally got into the MiLs (and majors) he was a catcher and was praised as a veteran presence and a handler of pitchers. In addition, I do recall him described earlier in his career as having a good arm (good enough to play third at some points). I think he was probably an athletic, if average-fielding catcher who lacked Biz Mackey's flashier defensive credentials, but whose defense didn't impair his teams. We've already inducted a guy with a bad catching glove who hit well (Torre), another multi-position NgL catcher who probably didn't have top-notch catcher-defense (Santop), we'll probably elect a guy with a questioned/questionable glove but who hit very well (Ted Simmons), and we're certainly going to elect a guy who couldn't throw to second in Mike Piazza. I think Trouppe fits right "in."

Ellie Howard
May appear on my ballot again this year.

Tommy Leach
On my ballot this year. As a 3B he's among the top dozen in history thanks to a very long career and a moderately good peak. As a CF, he's among the top 25 for the same reasons. Put 'em together, and he's a solid top-20 kind of guy at two positions of about equal defensive value. And interestingly, two positions with very different skill sets that show us a lot about the wide breadth of athletic talent he had.

And whether we are under-valuing borderline pitchers generally.
Which kinds of borderliners? Shorter-career/medium-peak pitchers? Or long-career/low-peak pitchers? Long-career/mid-peak pitchers walk in, as long as they're over 4000 innings or so. High-peak/short-career guys walk in too as long as they're over 2250 innings or so. But 2500+ with medium peak or 4000+ with low peak are both tough sells.

The problem with an exercise of this nature is that almost by definition, the top returning backloggers are not clearly better than other backloggers of their type/position. If they were clearly better, then we'd have elected them long ago. Rather, they're slightly better or arguably better than the competition. For example, Quincy Trouppe is the top returnee at catcher but he's still only on half the ballots. So roughly half the voters prefer another catcher to Quincy Trouppe. The problem of course is that the other half of the voters can't agree on which catcher they prefer to Trouppe- whether it's Bresnahan, Schang, Lombardi, Howard or Munson. If the other half could agree on which catcher they thought was better, then that other catcher would be higher. So any time you do this kind of exercise, it's relatively easy to find some voters saying "no, that guy's not the best." Despite that flaw in this kind of approach, there is some value to it so I'm willing to play along.

C- Trouppe

I agree with Eric C. I think that Trouppe is handily better than the rest of the group. And I do think that Trouppe is one of the best Negro League candidates left on the ballot. I'm still not entirely comfortable with how I've divided Bresnahan, Lombardi, Howard and Munson but I'm very comfortable with having Trouppe ahead of the rest.

IF- Childs, Boyer, Fox, Moore

That's an interesting group. I prefer Fox to Childs, but I do think that we have the best at each position represented there in Boyer, Fox and Moore.

P--none/Redding, Walters, Grimes, Welch, Dean

It is interesting that we don't have any pitchers that high in the backlog. Is it a by-product of having recently elected Mendez, Waddell and Pierce? If so, will one or more of these pitchers move up in the backlog now that those three are off of the list? Are we currently undervaluing pitchers compared to hitters? I know that there are a few voters out there with only 0, 1 or 2 pitchers on their ballot. Or are we simply more divided about which kinds of pitchers to elect? The peak/career split can be pretty strong when it comes to pitchers. Just look at that list with a peak-heavy candidate like Dean and a couple of career-heavy candidates like Grimes and Welch.

As to the questions about Don Newcombe. He deserves 2 full years of military credit for time spent in Korea. Those 2 years come right in the midst of his peak and should give him 7 Cy Young caliber seasons, more than any other pitcher on the ballot and as many high-quality seasons as a lot of the hitting candidates like Charlie Keller. I also think that he deserves some minimal Negro League/minor league credit. Newcombe started pitching in Negro Leagues before signing with the Dodgers. However, the Dodgers had a (most likely wise) policy of slowly integrating one player at a time so Newcombe spent several years waiting in the minors before getting his turn. He was clearly a Major League caliber player at that time though I wouldn't argue that he was yet an All-Star caliber player. Even so, the process of integration prevented Newcombe from having those ramp-up seasons that would have added to his career value. He'd get full credit if he had stayed in the Negro Leagues, which would have been the case if he had played 10 years earlier. He'd get full credit if he'd been transferred straight to the majors, which would have been the case if he had played 10 years later. I think he shouldn't be penalized for being one of the pioneers of integration and should therefore get some credit for those years. Again, I'm not saying we create peak years out of whole cloth. But even if you're only giving him 10 wins a year for those minor league seasons on top of the military credit, you're looking at a pitcher who's 209-120 instead of 149-90.

For me, if we're going to consider any more white dead-ball or 19th century pitchers, I'd have Vic Willis at the head of that list rather than Welch. (On the other hand, Willis is not even on my ballot.) For mid-century pitchers, I find it hard to choose between Walters and Tommy Bridges, and I do have both of them on my ballot. (As we try to remember all of the factors that initially lifted Wes Ferrell and Dazzy Vance out of the group that contains them.) Grimes looks way too much like Kaat to me: the quantity without the needed quality.

cribbed from the DanG's files, this time listing only serious candidates looking forward(and yes, that is a very fine line; I erred on the side of inclusion at times while trying to keep the lists lean - from 3 to 7 players):

And toss in the closers too. Henke, Montgomery, Doug "Two Beers for Each Out" Jones, Wetteland, Myers, those guys whose WS won't look so great, but who were top-of-the-heap relievers for good stretches of time.

All of these guys have some really powerful arguments in their favor based on a combination of uberstats, reputation monitor/Keltner, and HOM precedent. And many also have difficult context illusions for us to push through, especially regarding starting-pitcher workloads, changing relief-ace usage, low late-80s run context, high 1990s run context. All in addition to our usual assortment of issues related to peak/career, positional/era balance.... ; )

Not to mention that we'll likely all have strong opinions on many or all of them due to having actually witnessed their careers in part or total.

Some portion of these toughies are going to make it hell for the Beckleys, Joneses, or Moores to find their way through the backlog thicket. Which is how it should be of course. Just because you've been on the ballot since 1898 or 1910 or whatever doesn't mean you get any senior-ballot-member-in-good-standing breaks.

Eck, Ozzie, Sutton and Whitaker aren't real tough for me: IN, the tough one will be determining which 1B/OF makes it (especially versus the growing backlog of outfielders). The right answer might be "none of them".

DL, your post is exactly why I think this will be really interesting. I think we all probably look at this list and say to ourselves something similar about three-four of the guys. I have two guys I see as INs: Stieb and W Clark. All the others I'm not yet sure at all about. But so, we'll all have 2-5 guys we're feeling pretty strongly about in that vein. For instance, C. Cobb's already mentioned he expects Smith and Whitaker to receive substantial support, and I think he's mentioned Randolph too. Which I've taken to mean he will support them too. The commish has talked openly about Dawson and John. Still others have mentined Eckersley as being prominent INs for them. Oh, and I forgot about Puckett in this group too.

Anyway, I guess it's just like always, except that now we have much clearer impressions, and it feels like the career candidates are becoming more numerous which means the natural peak/career divisions among us could come into play with more and more intensity. But that last piece is my own impression only and not based in, you know, facts and stuff.

Why aren't we slowing things down to monthly as we come closer to the present day? I can understand wanting to have things caught up by 2008 but right now there is a gap of August 2007 to November 2007 between elections. We could add an extra discussion week between elections starting in 2000 and another extra week starting in 2005 and not miss the 2008 election window. I think discussing 2000 for an extra week would be more fruitful than discussing 2008 for an extra four months.

In past years, there has been a two-week holiday break around this time.
During that time, there would be a discussion of the latest HOF ballot.
If we continue that tradition, then each election 1992 and later would be delayed by two weeks.

Notes:
1) Another good period for the backlog, in '08 and '09 especially.
2) There is some chance that a minor candidate or two escaped my net, someone with token appearances in 2004-06.
3) Again, there is an asterisk by players who are eligible earlier than the BBWAA rules, due to ignoring token appearances at the end of their career.
4) Sasaki is the JL all-time saves leader and pitched great, briefly, in MLB, so he's worth looking at.

2 of those 11 will be "modern" backloggers Fingers and Randolph. I'm guessing that Dave Stieb and Tony Perez make it also. Still that leaves 7 slots. I'm rooting for Cravath and Johnson out of the top returnees, the rest I'm not voting for.

17 new HOFers, 16 potential HOMers, Carter already being elected. Even if we elect them all then there is room for 11 additional backloggers in the HOM. And will we elect them all? Perez is already backlogged and doubts have been raised about Sutter and Puckett and maybe others. Though some of those additional backloggers will be from the "new backlog" of Randolph, Gossage, Whitaker, Dawson, Trammell, Will Clark, McGwire, etc.

That's 11 current backloggers. I am sure there will be movement among them but I took them in the order of the 1998 results. Stieb and Oms are next and are on 15-16 ballots. Ch. Jones is on 14. Leach and GVH are next and are on 12-13. So I don't see much movement on the borderline but rather among the likely electeds of 2000-2009. Stieb or Oms ahead of Ch. Jones is the one.

Among the newbies, I have included Dawson, Puckett, Mattingly, Dale Murphy and K. Brown among those who don't look to me like NBs. Sure, there's opposition to all of them, but the alternative is Ch. Jones, Oms, Stieb, Leach, GVH, etc., all of whom have a ways to go. I didn't project Albert Belle. The peak is pretty good but his record looks way to much like Hack Wilson's to me. Will the Thrill OTOH looks like an NB--Richie Allen is more his comp I'd say.

The newbie borderliners I did not project "in" include J. Clark, McGriff, Edgar, Raffy, Walker and Olerud with more than 300 WS. Raffy at 395 is the high and I don't see how we could keep him out, but I'm projecting some boycott action in his first year on the ballot.

The newbie pitchers are a damn weak lot between Ryan and the guys who are still active. I'm projecting only one starting pitcher--K. Brown. I don't know that he's better than Stieb or Hershiser or Jack Morris for that matter at this point, I haven't looked in detail, I only noted that he is the leader among starting pitchers on WS. They all look outside to me but, like I say, I haven't looked in detail yet. I am projecting Gossage but not Lee Smith among relievers but if there's a groundswell for more pitchers, Smith could be the beneficiary, but so could Grimes or Welch or Hershiser. I cannot see Dennis Martinez.

Like I say, at the very end of the rainbow as of today, you gotta ask yourself--do I like Charley Jones, Tony Perez, Dave Stieb, Alejandro Oms, Kevin Brown, Raffy Palmeiro, Fred McGriff, Lee Smith, Edgar Martinez, Albert Belle...pick 3. Those will be the last decisions we know of today.

> The newbie pitchers are a damn weak lot between Ryan and the guys who are still active.

Bret Saberhagen is the best of the lot. If Fingers is in, Lee Smith should be also. He'll probably have to wait as long as Fingers though. Tiant could benefit also. Stieb is pretty clearly a better choice than Bucky Walters.

Interesting will be whether he or Griffey Jr will be the first HOMer to wear a Mariners cap.

I'm pretty sure that'll be Edgar. To me, 2012 looks like Bernie Williams + two backloggers, with Edgar having a good chance of being one of them. However, we'll have to see what happens to McGriff, Walker, Olerud, the size of Palmeiro's boycott...

Looking into the future until 2009 the only iffy candidates I'm likely to support are Saberhagen, Cone and possibly Lee Smith. Nobody else gets above the top 25 of players eligible now. I don't think Will Clark is iffy in this crowd.

We may rush Will Clark in like we did Keith Hernandez & Dwight Evans... but I'd certainly like to take a long look at him. His career is not long, he's got a ton of superior contemporaries, and he's got some in-season durability issues. Why him and not Cepeda or Cash?

The details of the discussion can wait until he's eligible and has his own thread, but I think being "underrated" is a big boost for an HOM candidate. Plus his retiring young puts him on the ballot before all of his superior contemporaries, which seems a bit unfair.

Plus his retiring young puts him on the ballot before all of his superior contemporaries, which seems a bit unfair.

Honestly, I don't think this is much of a problem. Even using HOM-time (which, by that time, is pretty much the same as real time), we'll have an idea of what to do with most of his contemporaries by the time he is eligible.

Yes. IF we were to do this all over again, I would support an age-based eligibility requirement over the current retirement-based one.

I agree. IIRC, when we were deciding eligibility rules there was some concern over being able to compare our elections to the actual Coop elections. I think we have discovered there is no merit to such concerns, we should have felt free to design our system independently.

Actually, I kinda like the five year rule, but I think we should've also set a minimum age of, say, 42 to be eligible.

When I arrived in 1904, someone (a Cardinal fan?) expressed concern regarding Amos Rusie, the age-contemporary of McGinnity who was practically done before McGinnity's debut. It's clear that Rusie didn't need the early cosideration; he is not close to the bubble. I suspect that some who were elected on the first ballot at a ripe old age would struggle to get in under a slightly different system. For example Red Faber waltzed in over several incumbents who were later elected and some of them are never named among the weakest or most regrettable selections, whereas Faber has been named.

For example Red Faber waltzed in over several incumbents who were later elected and some of them are never named among the weakest or most regrettable selections, whereas Faber has been named.

In Faber's case, I think the speed that he made it into the HoM has caused some to think of him as a regrettable selection (I don't, BTW). Rixey is really not that much different than him, yet doesn't have the same stigma since it took many years before he was inducted.

Interesting that a 1980s 1B, some guy named Eddie Murphy--hey I saw him in Beverly Hills Cop--is eligible just one year before Fielder. Tells you a lot about both. Still as a peak voter, I'm not sure that McGwire doesn't stay #1. And Mattingly and Perez, two more recent backloggers, are still kickin' around. Mattingly would be somewhere around the 5-6 group while Perez remains hard to place. He seems better than that but might really end up in the 7-9 group. Not sure right now. That's a lot to choose from, but Will Clark is not hard to choose, not in the least.

Look how the HBP standard moved on Galarraga. During his first peak, the expected one at ages 26-28, he led the league twice with 10-10-13 times hit. During his surprising renaissance he merely finished second once with 17-17-25-17 times hit. In the meantime hitters adopted body armor.

Well, you are also a prime voter too, see Gossage. But "Steady Eddie's" 12 years with Baltimore is too long to be a prime, eh?

In the first chapter of Baseball's All-Time Best Hitters, while explaining the limitation of his final analysis to everyone's first 8000 PA (or AB?), Michael Schell observed that Murray is the leader in decline after 8000. Clemente is the leader in gain after 8000 and is the only important hitter who needs a special exception to "first 8000" evaluation. The metric is Schell-adjusted batting average, I recall; that is a rate statistic. Murray's decline was not precipitous (he was past 9000 PA when he led the majors in batting average in 1990) but he put up almost 13000 PA in all.

First, regarding candidates of the last decade who weren't "no-brainers" from post #818 by myself and #819 by Chris Cobb:

Me: All told, we'll elect 35 HOMers between 1989 and 2000. I think as many as 21 of those spots are going to be easily claimed by new candidates: Yastrzemski, Perry, Bench, Jenkins, Morgan, Palmer, Carew, Fingers, Rose, Seaver, Jackson, Niekro, Carlton, Schmidt, Blyleven, Carter, Brett, Yount, Ryan, Fisk and Gossage. That leaves 14 spots up for grabs. However, those 14 spots won't all go to the current backlog. There are new candidates who aren't as obvious as the titanic twenty-one but who will still get significant consideration: Singleton, Staub, Grich, Perez, Cey, Garvey, Sutton, Nettles, Simmons, Sutter, Da. Evans, John, Rice, Hernandez, Quisenberry, Dw. Evans, Parker, Randolph, Stieb, Morris and Hough. That's more than enough players to claim the other 14 spots though I don't think we'll quite embrace them all. Rather, I would guess that we're looking at 7-8 of the new backlog and 6-7 of the current backlog getting in during this time.

You were right. All three were inducted in their first year of eligibility, though Grich's quick induction was in part due to a significant boycott of Pete Rose.

Perez, Hernandez, and Randolph are likely HoMers, though it's conceivable that they won't be elected before 2007.

Fairly accurate analysis again. Hernandez looks like he should have belonged in the first group as he was elected quite easily. Randolph looks pretty good for this year. Perez has been a top ten returnee and could go in by 2007 but is by no means a lock to do so.

Staub, Cey, Nettles, John, Dw. Evans, and Stieb will draw support and have a shot at election. These six are the ones who will _really_ compete against the current backlog.

And so far, the backlog is holding its own against this group. Dwight Evans was elected immediately, but that only means that Perez and Dewey trade spots. Stieb is the only top ten returnee from this group, and therefore the only one with a strong shot at election by 2007.

Garvey, Sutter, Rice, Quisenberry, Parker, Morris, and Hough will attract little support. I will be surprised if any break the top 20, though Sutter, Quisenberry, and Hough have shots and doing so.

Correct again, Chris. Some of these guys attract a handful of votes but none has a serious shot at induction any time soon.

I had predicted that we would elect 7 or 8 guys from this group. Da Evans, Dw Evans, Grich, Hernandez, Simmons and Sutton make for 5. Randolph and Stieb look good for 6 and 7. Perez is a possible #8. Also, I made a mistake in my initial list. Rollie Fingers didn't draw as much support as I had predicted and didn't garner quick election. He's still a top ten returnee and could be elected by 2007, but so far his spot has gone to the one of the backlog candidates.

Well, let's say it is 7-8 backloggers, which is probably realistic. Do we have the right ones?

Pos/Top8Backlog/AlsoRans(with 100 pts or more)

C--Trouppe/Bresnahan

Personally I'm more partial to Ellie Howard with some credit for NeL play and for the career interruptus most black players not named Robinson or Mays experienced during the integration era. Bresnahan is legit, too. I'm happy that, adding Ellie, we would have the right 3 guys under consideration.

Trouppe got in. Bresnahan made a brief appearance in the top ten. Howard did garner more than 100 points in the '98 election though the strong new class of '99 pushed him back below that threshold.

Related question: Is Trouppe (are Moore, Trouppe and Redding) the best NeLer(s) left?

IF--Childs, Boyer, Fox, D. Moore/Doyle

A case of "ignore the rest." The focus here is already working for these guys while, by comparison, we are spread our "hitters" votes around very broadly. Are these guys really better or just benefiting from our confusion about the hitters? I like Doyle over Childs and Fox, and I still like Ed Williamson over Ken Boyer, but none of these guys is a bad choice. Moore has probably taken over from Kiner, now, as THE pure peak candidate.

We elected all of the big four (there was a pretty big gap from the first four who were all top ten returnees down to Doyle). Who are the infield candidates now? Well, there's new backlog candidate Randolph at 2B. Then there's Nettles at 23, Rizzuto at 24, Doyle at 26, Clarkson at 28, McGraw at 33 and Elliott at 35 (going by those who garnered 100 or more points in the more open 1998 election).

Oddly, the top cornerman is not really a "hitter," or is he? His hitting has probably been lost in translation. All those triples that would have been HR in other eras! Interesting that we otherwise are favoring the peakers over the careerists, which is a bit uncharacteristic of the HoM. I would tout Cepeda more except that if y'all looked more closely I'm afraid you might end up preferring Cash. (F. Howard is basically interchangeable with Baby Bull, Gavy and Cash, too.)

In sum, right now we are poised to elect no backlog "pure hitters." And that's OK, we probably have too many already. Or is it OK? And which ONE might it be? I mean besides old eagle eye.

We did elect two cornermen, including one who Marc refers to as a "pure hitter" in Keller. The others are still in the mix, though they've been joined by new candidates like Singleton, R Smith and Staub.

We could go deeper than 2 here and not elect a bad choice, though I prefer Roush and Browning on this list and don't prefer Duffy and GVH. Leach is the guy who remains really intriguing, not to say that he should rate higher but that he is a true true hybrid and therefore more intriguing--more likely to have been misunderstood--than anybody else on the list. How is he NOT better than Hugh Duffy?

We've picked up two of the centerfielders in Wynn and Roush. Based on his performance in the '99 election (sandwiched between Bonds and Cepeda), Dale Murphy now joins this group and will likely pick up 100 points in a the more open upcoming elections. And I guess R Smith belongs here as well and not in the corner section.

P--none/Redding, Walters, Grimes, Welch, Dean

I think we probably need a pitcher but which one? Welch and Dean have their adherents but have for all intents and purposes been rejected. Redding remains poorly understood, is he or isn't he? I don't claim to really know. That leaves Walters, whom I am warming up to. And Bridges and Willis are close to 100 points, but even that would leave them 400 points short of election.

Marc's initial estimate was correct: we elected no backlog pitchers during this time. I suggested that maybe it was due to the then recent elections of backlog pitchers Mendez, Pierce and Waddell. I can't say for sure that was the case but after a drought during the '90s elections, pitchers look to be in pretty good position to claim backlog elections in the 2000s with old backloggers Redding and Walters and new backloggers Fingers and Stieb all in the top ten.

We ended up electing 9 backoggers, not the 6-8 that was predicted: 1 catcher, 1 first baseman, 2 second basemen, 1 third baseman, 1 shortstop, 2 centerfielders and 1 corner outfielder (Trouppe, Beckley, Childs, Fox, Boyer, Moore, Wynn, Roush and Keller). So far, those spots have come at the expense of Rollie Fingers and Tony Perez. But considering those two are 6th and 15th in the current backlog, it's likely that their elections were merely delayed.

Jim Wynn is one I hadn't anticipated though since his election I warmed up to him. I did not and do not support Beckley and Boyer. Boyer in particular has a whole lot of guys on the outside that look pretty much identical. But of course people say that of Fox, too, whom I did support. To some degree it comes down to Fox being the best eligible 2B (IMO) for awhile, while Boyer was never the best available 3B (IMO). That would be Ed Williamson. If we had elected Big Ed 75 years ago, would I have felt differently about Boyer?

If I understand, "IN" means first year and backlog means not so fast.
I say Trammell is IN, beating Whitaker and Puckett if necessary, with more "ballot strength-adjusted electoral support" than Molitor or Eckersley will get. We'll see whether . . .
whether I or anyone has a good measure of bsaes by that time.

Chris Cobb,
I have your eligibility lists #247 to #346.
And I have #217 whose discussion or proposal is lost in cyberspace.

>>
career = first and last year at which the player competed either in the top-level negro leagues, a Latin American league, the major leagues, or (in the case of black ballplayers who may not have been given a chance to compete in the majors even after integration) the organized minor leagues. An * after these dates indicates that my listed career date diverges from the dates listed at the top of the player's biographical entry in Riley. All deviations from Riley are compiled and explained in a file I hope to get uploaded to the HoM yahoogroups site.
<<

Do you have the latter?

Among the HOF nominees I guess C.I. Taylor did not play enough at high level to be covered for HOM purposes. Is that right?

Santiago and Alomar remind me of the wonderful diversity in baseball today. I'm sure I've mentioned before but in times less interested in promoting diversity a lot of the guys on the 2010 list would be listed by anglicized names. For instance,

To the best of my knowledge, Stanley Julian Antonio (Negrin) Javier, born in late 1964, was named in direct homage to Stanley Frank Musial, who had been Julian Javier's teammate for four years before Musial retired at the end of the 1963 season.

Danilo Tartabull is also the son of an active major league player - born in Puerto Rico, to a Cuban father.

I had a little theory about Tony Pena, Danny Tartabull, Ozzie Guillen, Tony Fernandez, Dave and Dennis Martinez, (but not Stan Javier after OCF's info). I wonder if, by coming up in late 1970s to early 1980s, they may be among the last of the big crops of Anglicized players. To test this, I went through the rosters of our current 30 teams on bb-ref, looking for players with anglicized-looking baseball names. I grouped players into three groups: guys with anglicized baseball names (Tony Batista); guys who might have anglicized baseball names (Manny Ramirez), guys with cognate names (David Ortiz):

I'm sure I missed a bunch, and there's lots of guys who you can't tell. Anyway, 3 guys I thought were definitely anglicized, 9 others i though were maybe anglicized. I haven't looked at other years, but given how large the Latino population is in baseball now (what, 30-40%?), it seems like a pretty small number of anglicized names. If this is truly a small number compared to 1957, 1967, 1977, 1987, 1997, then it represents a very interesting evolution in how those who name ballplayers (be it themselves, their teams, or the press) go about their task.

I'm unsure if whether simply adding a y or y-sound to the main consonant sounds in a person's name in order to create a nickname is an exclusively English-speaking thing to do. Or whether it would be just as common to do so in the D.R.

That is to say, are /saah-me/ and Sammy the same name? Would Sammy be known as Sammy in his homeland? Or Samito? Or something I don't know?

I don't have the cross-cultural chops to say, so rather than say it was definitely anglicized, I categorized those names elsewise.

1.
Chris Cobb,
I have your eligibility lists #247 to #346.
And I have #217 whose discussion or proposal is lost in cyberspace.

>>
career = first and last year at which the player competed either in the top-level negro leagues, a Latin American league, the major leagues, or (in the case of black ballplayers who may not have been given a chance to compete in the majors even after integration) the organized minor leagues. An * after these dates indicates that my listed career date diverges from the dates listed at the top of the player's biographical entry in Riley. All deviations from Riley are compiled and explained in a file I hope to get uploaded to the HoM yahoogroups site.
<<

Do you have the latter?

2.
Among the HOF nominees I guess C.I. Taylor did not play enough at high level to be covered for HOM purposes. Is that right?
[What years did he play for a team that should be considered major?]

3.
The other nominee who seems to be missing here [in "New Eligible"] is Red Parnell.
A skimpy sketch of Parnell at NBHOFM treats him a notable player. (but so does Connie Mack's HOF plaque)
[born 1905.
Riley lists major career 1926-43 plus 1946 and 1950.
Eligible when?]

Here are the newbies for the 2011 election, three years from now. Five or six solid candidates here. We should get Japanese League MLEs for Nomo. I could easily have missed some minor candidates. A tip of the cap to Juan V for the win shares info.

Too bad we'll have to wait a bunch of years until those elections, since I think they will be quite interesting. Plenty of new flesh for the backlog, which is a good thing since we'll thin it considerably in 2008-2009.